What are the best practices for identifying customer pain points during the discovery process?

Use the Ask Listen Innovate methodology to discover unmet and emerging needs. Get your customer into a frame of mind in which they are ready, able and willing to answer questions about their work, and you will discover the pain. 1. Move yourself and your prospect into the same "space and time". 2. Learn about your prospects early career, career transitions and achievements. 3. Learn about your prospects current work. 4. Learn about your prospects current struggles. 5. Learn about anticipated challenges. 6. Learn about the challenges that your prospect isn't focusing on because they don't think it can be addressed. 7. Learn the value of a solution to any of the issues discovered. Don't forget to get gather decision making practices.

Open-ended questions are also used by surveyors. So, what's the difference between sales and surveys? To understand customers' pain points before exploring their problems, salespeople need to build rapport and earn trust. This is because people won't share their problems if they don't know, like, and trust the person asking. Empathy is one skill that salespeople must have because if customers feel the salesperson is insincere, they won't trust them enough to share their problems. Salespeople need to build conversations rather than simply asking questions, allowing them to establish a deeper connection with customers and gather valuable insights to tailor their approach and offerings accordingly.

Conduct thorough compatibility checks with existing systems before purchasing new software. This involves evaluating the software’s integration capabilities, checking for API support, and ensuring it can seamlessly work with the current infrastructure. Offering a trial period or demo can help in assessing compatibility in a real-world scenario.

The best discovery questions (1) qualify known problems (2) Unearth unknown problems (3) Focus on the challenges that achieve goal achievement where the solution helps. One approach is to use high gain questions. Taking this directly from Challenger, they talk about high gain questions. These are open questions that unlock valuable information that may not be available to other sellers (competitors.) They prompt the prospect to provide richer information than would normally be provided. Open ended. Targeted towards a specific objective or outcome. Thought provoking and often result in a response like 'Hmm. that's a good question that I will need to think about for a moment.'

Listening means not just hearing the words, but also understanding their meaning and context. Actively listening involves paying attention not only to tone and body language but also to the actions of the speaker. Empathetic listening goes further by genuinely understanding and feeling the other person's emotions and concerns, and demonstrating care and support through actions.

When starting a call with a customer, open the conversation with a brief statement about what you can accomplish on the call together, then ask what that person is looking to learn or take away from the conversation. Customers will normally use this as an opportunity to brain-dump everything they're looking for and the background behind the conversation. From here, you can dive deeper into any specific details that were mentioned using mirroring and get to the root challenges.

The SPIN framework is one of many sales methodologies, such as Consultative Selling, Target Account Selling, and several others. While these sales methodologies are good tools to help sales in the sales process, the most important aspect of a sales framework or methodology is not memorizing every step of the process, but understanding how to use it and knowing which sales methodology is suitable for the customer and situation during the sales process.

Every good discovery call covers the same ground. Which is: What’s the problem? What’s the impact of that problem? What’s the cause of that problem? What’s the cost or risk if they do nothing? What’s the payoff if they solve it? Do their Executives care about solving it? It’s just SPIN. If you’ve not read the book, now’s the time. S is Situation: What's the current situation: Tell me what it is today? P is what's the Pain: What's the problem? What problem are you trying to solve? I is Implication: What is that problem costing you? That's what implicates pain. Implicate pain is the most important. It’s not a problem unless there's pain associated with it. N is the Need payoff: If you solve the problem, what's in it for you?

BANT is ok for incoming lead qualification. It's not good for discovery. In software sales there will be a budget, authority is a group of individuals, yes you need need and to know timing but the critical success factor is identifying and quanitifying known and unknown problem like this: - DURATION: How long has it been an issue? - ACTIONS: How have you tried to fix it already? Feel like? Results? - BUSINESS IMPACT: What happens if you solve this? - PERSONAL: What toll is taking on you? How would this help you? - WHO CARES: Who else cares about this? - COST OF INACTION: What happens if you don’t solve this?

It is very different to understand what a customer needs and why the customer needs it. Great software sellers are not satisfied with a description of the customers problems but they always go a layer deeper. They are willing to ask tough questions to unveil the impact that the need is causing in their business and how that affects the company and the prospect. They are then able to share stories that are relatable to the prospect to ensure they know you have helped others in their situation.

Clearly articulate the software’s scalability options to accommodate business growth. This includes the ability to add more users, increase storage or processing capacity, and integrate with additional services or modules. Providing a roadmap of future updates and enhancements can also reassure customers about the long-term viability of the software solution.

Problem Quantification Is Critical Poor problem quantification is likely to result In no next step because you’ve not created enough why; need and urgency. This is without doubt the critical success factor of good discovery and where most sellers fail. It requires an understanding of the problem space, getting to the root cause of the problem and the cause and effect or ripple effect of taking a problem away. Good quantification can turn a 50k problem into a 500k problem and in doing so raise it to top 3 priority status. This can not be underestimated.